


i'm not the son of god

by vlieger



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 15:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vlieger/pseuds/vlieger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>1. Lucas Neill did play part of his youth career, between 1991-93, at Manly United (known pre-2004 as the Manly-Warringah Dolphins), a team in what was then the New South Wales Super League. Bankstown was also a team playing in the same division in the same year, although I made up the stat about the final.</p><p>2. Harry Kewell missed out on Australia's final 2006 WC match (which they lost 1-0 to Italy in the first knockout round) because of septic arthritis in his left foot.</p><p>3. Following the 2006 WC, Harry didn't play again for Australia until late June 2007, because of this and various other injuries. </p><p>4. Lucas Neill was named captain of the Socceroos on October 6, 2006.</p><p>5. Lucas announced in August 2006 that he wouldn't sign another contract with Blackburn, and after rumours linking him to several big-name clubs, as well as an undisclosed bid from Liverpool, in January 2007 he turned it down to sign with West Ham.</p><p>6. Australia played Uzbekistan in Sydney on April 1, 2009. They won 2-0, with Kewell scoring a penalty, and by drawing the following match against Doha 0-0, qualified for South Africa 2010.</p><p>7. Lucas Neill signed with Galatasaray (based in Istanbul) in January 2010, almost two years after Harry Kewell, who signed in July 2008.</p><p>8. Title and quote from Biffy Clyro's <i>The Captain.</i></p></blockquote>





	i'm not the son of god

_line up your soldiers one final time_

i.

In 2006 Lucas Neill loses Australia the World Cup. Or he doesn't, but for five minutes in the showers he allows himself the luxury of believing it, and then he rubs his raw eyes, sets his shoulders, and walks outside to play a part he doesn't especially feel like, in that moment.

Harry says to him, curling a slim-boned hand over his bicep, "Fucking proud, you know," half-mumbled and almost incoherent, leaning in for a strange not-quite hug, nudging his nose against Lucas's damp cheek. Lucas blinks furiously. 

It hurts, but football hurts. People keep telling him this all through his career like it's something he's yet to experience, like that stoppage-time goal in the '92 final against Bankstown didn't feel, then, like the end of the fucking world. He thinks, viciously, that at least no one will say it like that anymore. 

Thinks, if they tried, he'd tell them where to fucking shove it. No one knows how football hurts better than him. He's believed it for a long time, and he leaves Germany believing it still: football hurts, and every player knows this, and he is every player. 

 

ii.

Liverpool is like the ocean. It's the overhanging industrial-like set to its bones, the barefaced salt breezes, the seagulls nesting in the cracks of ancient maritime buildings. Lucas hasn't kept count of exactly how many times he's been there. It's not a lot, relatively speaking, but enough that there's something friendly about the place, something easy and instantly recognisable. He likes that. One strange fear he's always had is the innate foreignness of so many places he visits, the way every street corner looks like the next.

They don't, in Liverpool, and of course Harry is there. They catch up every time there's a match, at first out of some national obligation, and later because they want to, because Lucas likes the way Harry's voice is softened by his odd half-accent, the way he's quiet and friendly but so very blunt. 

In the hazy heat of the lagging British summer Lucas trips his way over to Liverpool for no reason other than some niggling maudlin, and slouches over coffee in their usual café, mouth curled in a half-hearted reflection of the tiredness steeping his limbs, stretched out dry and itchy like a not-quite restless second skin. 

Harry laughs at him. "You look just like everyone back home expects you to," he says. 

Lucas mulls a little on how much, really, he likes that, the way _back home_ still sits so light on Harry's tongue. "Yeah, well." He shrugs. "Maybe I feel just like everyone back home expects me to." He stirs his coffee a little guiltily. "Sorry," he adds, after a silence.

"You shouldn't," says Harry, ignoring the apology. It's his own quiet form of reprimand, Lucas has come to realise. 

"I know," says Lucas. 

Harry nods. "As long as that's clear," he says, and smiles a smile that's more lines about the eyes than it is teeth, slow and sweet.

He reaches out to cup a hand over Lucas's on the table, quick and fleeting.

 

When they head outside the sun is setting, and it's still hot, a fresh-smelling, clinging kind of heat that reminds Lucas a little of summers in Sydney and all along Australia's east coast. Not quite so dusty, maybe. Harry is limping beside him. 

"Hey," says Lucas. "How is it?" He glances down at Harry's foot. 

"It hurts," says Harry. There's sweat gathering at his temples. 

"Yeah," says Lucas quietly. "But you’ll live."

Harry glances at him and his smile then is sharp, white teeth cutting quick through the dusk, his eyes bright when he echoes, "Yeah, I’ll live."

 

The year stutters along and the winter is strange, all huge circulating names, all Liverpools and Barcelonas and Chelseas, and in the end what it boils down to is West Ham. 

He's not unhappy. This is him, he knows, too solid, too straightforward for the kind of place Harry belongs, the kind of liquid changeability of somewhere like Liverpool, with all his lightness of foot and easy, weightless stride. 

He tells Harry over the phone, joking, "It wasn’t because of you."

Harry says, "Oh my God, I know that, you arse," and it’s maybe a little weird that Lucas feels relieved, anyway.

 

iii.

Lucas watches Harry train for the first time since Germany, more than a year on, with his lip between his teeth. 

There's some furrowed, savage set to his face, the same desperate determination to get the best of his body he's worn for a while now. 

He can't see it himself, but Harry is fragile beneath his painted skin, his weathered lines. It's hard not to notice the bruises that litter his abdomen, the ribs casting shadows as they fold around his sides. He licks his lips too often and his fingers flutter light, anxious, more than he realises. 

Lucas wants to tell him, _stop doing this to yourself, stop hoping like this,_ and, _who does? Who hopes like you do anymore, at your age, who has ever been let down as many times as you have and still hoped so fiercely?_ and yet. He can't, because it's all Harry can do, all that's keeping him here, and they need him, in the moments he's put back together, they need all that fierce fast beauty and desperate strength. He can't, because it's more admirable than it is sad, even if only just.

It's probably really stupid, but whenever Harry's set to play after another long lay-off Lucas thinks about the butterflies he used to catch as a kid with his friends, the way they held them in their jars and stared for hours and hours, and how afterwards they dipped so close to the ground, wings beating in some hurried, desperate rhythm before they drew themselves up and flew off over the fence. 

That second of doubt when they thought maybe this time they waited too long to let them go.

 

In Australia they train at the beach. Lucas misses this in England, diving under the waves and curling his toes in the sand, the morning sun on his shoulders. Afterwards Harry says to him, curving a sliding, sticky wet hand around his wrist, "Quick, quick, let's sneak off," and Lucas blinks, lashes dripping, and says, "What?" glancing up towards the cars parked along the boardwalk, the scattered photographers. "Come on." Harry grins and for a second he looks about twelve, salt-crusted hair and covered in sand. "I want some ice cream. Quick, before they see us." And somehow Lucas finds himself ducking out of sight between the dunes, slipping on the soft sand; that sweating, not quite uncomfortable itchy feeling like he remembers from every weekend when he was a kid. 

"The fuck," he hisses, when Harry stops just ahead of him, crouched low. "You're not." He blinks at Harry, edging forward to peer around a bush. "You're not a fucking ninja."

Harry glances back over his shoulder. "I'd say that was pretty ninja." He grins. 

"Okay," says Lucas slowly. "Now what?"

"Now we get ice cream," says Harry, rolling his eyes. "Duh."

"Oh my God, did you just." Lucas stops, shakes his head. 

Harry shuffles towards him, digging grooves in the sand with his knees, and pokes his chest. "Put your shirt on," he says sternly. "You're not fit to be seen in public."

Lucas glances belatedly down at his shirt, still clutched and crumpled in one of his hands. 

"You're mental," says Lucas even as he pulls it over his head and plasters himself close behind Harry. He smells of salt and sweat and the faint lingering remnants of sunscreen. "You've actually lost it."

"Fuck you," says Harry absently. "Okay, it's still early, so the coast is pretty clear."

"Oh my God," says Lucas again, muffling his laugh against Harry's shoulderblade. 

"We gotta be quick, in and out, no mucking about," says Harry. Lucas arches his neck and sees him biting down on a smile, eyes bright, creased at the corners. "Buy your ice cream and head back down to the beach. Okay?"

"Okay," echoes Lucas. 

"Okay," says Harry, and stands, hauling Lucas up with him. "Go, go, go, go!"

"Insane," mutters Lucas, but he's laughing, almost too hard to buy his ice cream, tripping over his own feet like anything but a footballer as he sprints back to the edge of the water behind Harry, splashing in ankle-deep. 

The ice cream is cheap and shitty and the backs of his calves feel over-stretched, sore, but it's kind of fantastic just the same, and in this moment Germany seems a very long time ago and South Africa a very long time away, nothing but an endless, lonely stretch of beach and the cloudless winter sky, the waves frothing about his feet and Harry smiling his squinting, too-big for magazines smile, all unpolished lines creasing his eyes, little licks of ice cream melting and running down over his knuckles, the veins in the back of his hand, looping around his wrist and staining the tattoo some odd, translucent colour, reflecting the morning-blue sky.

Watching him, Lucas remembers licking the soured taste of sugar and milk years ago from girls' lips, a couple of kilometres up the coast and closer to the city. 

He blinks. He wants very much to kiss Harry on the mouth. 

His skin feels too tight, too hot, drunk on the sun, and it passes in a merciful, dizzying exhale.

 

iv.

In Sydney, four days before they're up against Uzbekistan, Harry starts reading _The Da Vinci Code_. 

"It's shit," Lucas tells him, watching him read while they're waiting for Pim in the changerooms, swallowing a grin.

Harry ignores him. 

"Seriously, it's like, really offensive to Christians, or something," says Lucas.

Harry slides his middle finger prominently over the back cover.

"I can cook, you know," says Lucas.

"What?" Harry looks up, one long finger tucked along the spine of his book. 

"I can cook," says Lucas. "I'm pretty good at it."

"Okay." Harry blinks owlishly at him. 

Lucas rolls his eyes. "So come over for dinner, you moron."

"Oh." Harry sets his book down. "Oh, okay." He smiles, sudden and happy. 

 

He leans across Lucas's kitchen counter later, loose-limbed and pliant, watching him cook. His shirt is riding up over his hips and Lucas can see a bruise dipping into the small of his back, just a shade or two darker than his skin, like over-ripe fruit. 

"What are you making?" he asks, craning his neck. 

"Curry," says Lucas, peering into the pot. 

"Oh, hey." Harry grins. "I like that."

Lucas says, "Good," looking down at Harry sprawled over his elbows, his tongue tucked into the corner of his lips, and reaches out without thinking, pressing a thumb to the top of his left cheekbone, right where it curves around his eye. 

Harry looks up at him, eyelids beating curiously, pulling at the skin beneath his hand.

 

v.

When Lucas moves to Istanbul Harry says, "You're going to love it here."

Lucas notices the way he looks weathered but happy, and says, "You should show me around."

"Sure," says Harry. 

It's probably the biggest difference between them that Lucas is aware of, the way it's enough for Harry just to play, the way everything he does is this one clawing, exhausting quest to be picked for next week's lineup, to be called up for the next international. 

Lucas doesn't so much doubt what he can do as who he is. 

Sometimes he's jealous of Harry for it and the rest of the time he's just not sure, watching the way Harry's eyes go quiet when his body fails him again. It's a more basic, more beautiful kind of want, but falling short of the more easily attainable is maybe harder than falling short of overshot expectations. 

It's all about perception. He's learnt this.

 

Istanbul is magnificent through to her skeleton, and Harry was right, Lucas loves it, but it does have a way of dwarfing him, of towering over his little tangled memories from home and whispering things like better, grander, older, things that make him stupid and angry and homesick in the times he forgets just how nice, really, it is. 

Harry comes with him to see the Hagia Sophia. They stand beneath the dome with their heads tipped back, skin pulled taut and scratchy, and after a long stretch of silence he says quietly, careful not to echo, "I really like it here. I didn't at first, you know, but."

Lucas realises, abruptly, wondering in the same moment how he could have forgotten, that Istanbul is where Harry won his Champions League. He says, "Oh," stupidly. 

("I didn't win it," Harry told him, almost passed-out drunk, two and a half years ago in a dirty bar three streets back from the ocean in Liverpool, "They did, you know? Fif-- fifteen fucking, fifteen fucking minutes. You know, I thought, I thought for like, a second, or maybe a minute, or something, I thought about just sucking it up, but then I thought." He lowered his voice, then, and bit his lip like a sad guilty child. "I thought we might not win, and then I'm fucked for like, ever. And then it hurt too much when I tried to run and it didn't matter anyway, but sometimes I wish I'd sucked it up, which is weird, hey, because it really fucking hurt, I don't think I could have, but I wish." He stopped.

"I just don't like showing people the medal," he whispered in the bathroom, head dipped over the sink, Lucas's hand anchored low on his back, "I just. That's all.")

Harry glances at him, says, "What?"

"Nothing." Lucas shakes his head. "I forgot to bring a camera."

"We can come back." Harry shrugs. "You live here now."

"Oh," says Lucas again. He huffs a self-depreciating little laugh. "Yeah, right."

Harry bumps his shoulder, smiling, on the way out, and Lucas bites his lip before he gives in to the urge to sling an arm over Harry’s neck, quick and heavy. 

Football is a bit like this, Lucas thinks. You're never sure how much of it you love and how much you're actually in love with.

 

vi.

Drinking in that city is a strange experience. The way Harry leads them around corners is a lot like his blinded hope, twisting his mouth and saying, "I know it's around here somewhere, it's this really good place, they have like, these, oh." He stops, craning his neck upwards. "This is it. I think."

He says, "They have Australian beer," pressed up against Lucas's side as they wait to be served. He says, "I'm not sure why it still doesn't taste right, 'cause it's not like they open them between home and here, you know." He says, "If I get really drunk you have to make sure I don't like, fall over and break a leg, or whatever," and he's quietly, awfully serious, three drinks in. He says, "I really like you," some indefinable length of time later, tripping back from the bar and darting in right alongside Lucas.

Lucas chokes around the neck of his bottle. 

"I'm not being gay." Harry snorts. He's drunk, Lucas is relatively certain, his words a little slurred, his accent more fluid. "I'm just glad it's you who came here, you know?"

"I," says Lucas, "Thanks," and after a pause, "You are pissed, right?"

"Of course I'm fucking pissed," says Harry. He leans into Lucas's shoulder.

"Okay," says Lucas. "Cool. Hey." He glances down at the top of Harry's head and nudges into his side with his elbow, biting down on his lip. "Me, too."

"Oh," says Harry. He ducks a glance up through his lashes, all over-bright eyes and weathered smile-lines. "Good. 'Cause I mean it, you know."

"Yeah," says Lucas.

"God," says Harry. "We're so fucking gay. Thank God we're married. To women."

"Right," says Lucas. "'Cause if we weren't, I'd be all over you like a rash."

"You know it, baby." Harry tips him a wink.

"Oh my God," says Lucas. "Please, _please_ , never do that again."

"Hey, no." Harry gestures with his bottle. "Don't you think like, in another universe, or another life, whatever the fuck, we could've been, like, not married, but. You know."

Lucas blinks. "I thought you said you weren't being gay."

"I'm not being gay." Harry frowns. "I'm being. I'm being hypothetically gay." He grins up at Lucas.

"Oh." Lucas rolls his eyes. "Well, in that case." He pauses, swallowing a thoughtful mouthful of beer. His head feels too light for this kind of thing, really. "I don't know. I guess."

"Good," says Harry. "'Cause you know, we can't be hypothetically gay if you're not on board."

"Jesus," says Lucas. "I think you should shut the fuck up before you embarrass yourself. Any more, I mean."

"Sure," says Harry easily. "If you want." 

He's silent for a long moment, his head heavy, dipping into the hollow where Lucas's neck curves into his shoulder, and then he says again, quietly, "I really like you."

Lucas looks down at him. 

"I'm not being funny," says Harry. He pauses. "Or gay. Just."

"Okay," says Lucas. He slides an arm around Harry's back, feels the sharp jut of Harry's hipbone pressed against the inside of his wrist. "Okay. I know."

Harry fucking Kewell, he thinks. This is the tragedy of him: his steps still so small and precise below his blurred drunken eyes when they move outside onto the uneven footpath at three in the morning, arms held out like he's walking a tightrope, oh so careful and whispering, "Just stay close, I don't want," even as he cocks his head to the side and adds, "You know, I'm fucking hungry. You'd think they'd have good god-- goddamn, good goddamn falafels here, right?"

 

vii.

"The problem with the fans," Lucas says, twirling his bottle thoughtfully between his hands as another four years draws not slow enough to a close, "Is not the fans. The _fans_ , you know. It's the bandwagon jumpers. They don't get it. They think we can do anything."

Harry looks at him. "We can do anything," he says. His lips are slick with spit and parted, and he looks so very young in the dirty fetter of fluorescent light from the kitchen, the pale column of his throat working soft and stretched as he swallows, head tipped back. 

"That's my line," says Lucas quietly. He drains the last bitter dregs of his beer and watches Harry run a hand through his hair, palming over his smoothed-out forehead. 

"Then say it," says Harry simply. "Or maybe you don’t believe it."

Lucas bites down on his lip and looks at his hands, says, "Of course I believe it." It feels a lot like making a promise he's not sure he can keep.

When he glances back up at Harry the strange, vignetted moment is gone and he looks like himself again, rough cheeks and worry lines and shrewd, narrowed eyes. "You're not going to fuck up," he says. 

"I know that," says Lucas sharply. 

"You're a good captain," says Harry. 

"I know that too," says Lucas. 

Harry smiles at him, that squinting smile Lucas always thinks of as particularly Australian, too many childhood years spent looking into the sun. "Your goatee is stupid," he says. 

"Fuck off." Lucas grins. "It's a soul patch."

 

viii.

This is what Lucas thinks about, on the plane to South Africa: at Gallipoli in 1915, twenty thousand Australian soldiers landed on ANZAC Cove and stood for eight months in defence of their country while day after day they were gunned down from above, slaughtered. 

He doesn't remember much from his high school history classes, but he remembers Gallipoli, and thinking that this: this is bravery, knowing you are going to die and facing it with all the pride and mad spitfire crassness of a kid growing up wild and carefree somewhere beneath the Southern Cross. 

He knows he isn't anywhere near as brave, and that this isn't anything close to similar, but he still thinks about it, here, about how sometime soon will in all likelihood be the last time he leads his team out onto a World Cup pitch, how statistically, logically, they aren't going to make it, and yet he dreams strange, thunderous dreams of soldiers wearing green and gold and his team carrying bayonets out onto the pitch, gunfire and roaring crowds mingling in stands and steep cliffs, and when he blinks slowly awake as they touch down to a hazy, purple dawn he sets his jaw stronger than he feels, tilting his head at some proud, aching angle when he reaches up to the overhead compartment, and hopes, thinks God, please, fucking please.

In the seat by the window Harry is still sleeping, purplish-blue about the eyes, fist tucked against his jaw.

 

ix.

Harry says to him on their first dusty, pale orange morning in Africa, quiet and cracked, eyes restless over the lip of their high-altitude training pitch, "You don't know how much I want this," and Lucas knows that he doesn't, except maybe, in some ways, even more.

 

x.

Later Lucas thinks about how the ANZACs didn't win either, how their small victories (2-1 and still nothing, nothing but a shitload of beer and a plane ticket home) ended with eight thousand dead and not a thing but a successful evacuation of those still left alive. 

He thinks about the face of their story, not their victory but their bravery, and doesn't know, honestly, has no clue whether he's done enough. 

Harry touches the peak of his shoulderblade on his way through the changerooms and says quietly, "Fucking proud, you know," ducking his forehead into Lucas's hair.

Lucas curls a hand around his wrist, and beneath his fingers Harry's pulse is skittering like more words than either of them knows how to say.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Lucas Neill did play part of his youth career, between 1991-93, at Manly United (known pre-2004 as the Manly-Warringah Dolphins), a team in what was then the New South Wales Super League. Bankstown was also a team playing in the same division in the same year, although I made up the stat about the final.
> 
> 2\. Harry Kewell missed out on Australia's final 2006 WC match (which they lost 1-0 to Italy in the first knockout round) because of septic arthritis in his left foot.
> 
> 3\. Following the 2006 WC, Harry didn't play again for Australia until late June 2007, because of this and various other injuries. 
> 
> 4\. Lucas Neill was named captain of the Socceroos on October 6, 2006.
> 
> 5\. Lucas announced in August 2006 that he wouldn't sign another contract with Blackburn, and after rumours linking him to several big-name clubs, as well as an undisclosed bid from Liverpool, in January 2007 he turned it down to sign with West Ham.
> 
> 6\. Australia played Uzbekistan in Sydney on April 1, 2009. They won 2-0, with Kewell scoring a penalty, and by drawing the following match against Doha 0-0, qualified for South Africa 2010.
> 
> 7\. Lucas Neill signed with Galatasaray (based in Istanbul) in January 2010, almost two years after Harry Kewell, who signed in July 2008.
> 
> 8\. Title and quote from Biffy Clyro's _The Captain._


End file.
